HERE IS A fact: most Irish people over a certain age, say 50 for sure, remember where they were on a bright summer’s afternoon, 26 June 1996, when they heard that journalist Veronica Guerin had been murdered.

Some more facts: She was cut down by six bullets, fired by the pillion passenger on a motorbike, through the window of her car as she waited at traffic lights near Newlands Cross on her way back from Naas district court just before 1 pm.

Veronica’s mood was as sunny as the day, right up to the moment she had been executed.

Is this a fact? Yes, it is. She had driven to the courthouse that morning in fear that the fistful of speeding fines would come home to roost and put her and her cherry-red Opel Calibra – which doubled up as transport and mobile office – off the road.

Instead, she had escaped with a fine and spent her triumphant return to the city on one of her two phones, spreading the good news, including to the news desk of the Sunday Independent, and then to me, her colleague and her friend.

We had a laugh – as we always did – but the chat was brief. She was en route to the office, and we arranged to have a proper gossip over a coffee.

Within minutes of that call, she was dead.

Thirty years ago, Ireland was a different place. We were still shockable back then, not so desensitised to violence and brutality. The cold-blooded, meticulously planned daytime public execution of a journalist – a well-known, greatly-trusted female journalist – by criminals who really believed they were untouchable, shook the country to its very core.

Journalism, too, was a different world in 1996. No internet, and not everyone had a mobile phone. People got their news via TV, radio and newspapers, and reporters got their news stories by working the phones (a jealously-guarded contacts-book filled with important........

© TheJournal